Design, performance and perspective of the NA62-RICH

NA62 is an experiment designed to measure the branching fraction of the ultra-rare decay of the positively charged kaon into a pion and a neutrino-antineutrino pair. The specialties of its Ring Imaging Cherenkov detector (RICH) are the muon-pion separation, the sub-nanosecond timing and the participation in the lowest level trigger of the experiment. These characteristics made the NA62-RICH crucial for the physics data taking that run in the three-year period 2016–2018. Two aspects are currently under consideration to increase the impact of RICH in the broad NA62 physics program: a better time resolution to cope with higher intensity beam and the online extraction of high level features to be used in the trigger logic. This paper describes the RICH detector and presents its possible upgrades.